Wednesday, April 25, 2012

I thought of you this morning, Steelers fans. My son's daycare is doing a school-wide parade today with each of the classrooms dressing up as a group/animal/theme. Our son's class will be marching as a group of bees (taking bets on whether or not our son will leave his bee tentacles on his head for longer than 3 seconds) so all the kids was asked to dress in their best yellow and/or black. As I dropped our son off I noticed one kiddo rocking the mini Steelers jersey and thought that was a nice nod to NFL Draft season as well. Kudos, parents, kudos.

Anyway, we are indeed getting down to crunch time here: the NFL Draft is nearly upon us. Somehow I'm traveling again this weekend, which makes it the 3rd or 4th draft in a row that I've been on the road...but at least I've got plenty of time on Thursday night to take it all in. If you want to live chat with other draft fans, head on over to Dynasty League Football's chat on Thursday or Friday night. Now let's take a look at today's links:

Have you been busy this winter and perhaps just not on top of your fantasy football game? No problem. Catch up with The Hazean's Recapping Free Agency for Fantasy Football Owners and demonstrate your knowledge to all the other drafties you hang out with this weekend.

ProFootballFocus.com also has you covered with the top needs for each team in the league - Eve of the Draft: AFC Needs and NFC Needs. Note: not a fantasy focus here but clearly informative nonetheless for fantasy owners.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Greetings, fine readers. Once again I feel the need to apologize for my disappearing librarian act here. My mom had major back surgery a few weeks ago and I just spent some time back in Virginia with her to try and lend a hand as she slowly, slowly gets back to normal. Anyway, I know we're coming up on the draft and we've got lots of good material out there related to the Draft and just the 2012 season in general. So gear up, time for some Friday links...

First up, here are a few draft-related links:

FantasySharks.com has a quick and dirty overview of each position and players to keep an eye on - 2012 NFL Draft Guide.

There will be plenty of articles to come that analyze the 2012 season schedule, which was released earlier this week, but for now if you just want a schedule overview week-by-week, TOFantasySports.com has you covered.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Happy spring, my football friends. It has already hit 85 degrees several times here in east Tennessee, the Masters is over, and NFL Draft Day talk is really ramping up. Ahh, April, I do love you. I've got a handful of links for you today and hope to be back around on a more regular basis starting in the next few weeks.

As the 2012 season speculation begins, Razzball.com's Who to Follow for Fantasy Football Advice on Twitter is a solid, helpful piece. You'll see some Rotoworld names but also some less mainstream dudes/chicks as well. Definitely found a few people here that I didn't know about, which is always a good thing.

Speaking of Rotoworld, Unfilled Voids scopes out the top 10 positions across the league that haven't yet been addressed yet (or have the Luck/RG3 speculation) and how exactly Rotoworld sees them fulfilling these needs.

Last week Mike Clay from ProFootballFocus.com introduced a new stat: Average Depth of Target. Per Clay's article, it trumps yards-per-reception, yards-per-target, yards-after-catch, and any other pass catching stat you can think of. Interesting food for thought.

Matt Waldman is rolling out his annual look at incoming rookies for The Fifth Down, starting with RBs. I'm just going to link you to the main Fifth Down page since the Times is now limiting free articles even more, so I want you to land somewhere where you can scroll down and pick which rookie to read about.

4for4.com takes a look at players who were able to produce with limited targets in 2011 in order to help in Identifying Breakout WRs. Good list here, prepare to see many of these names a lot this summer.

As we start to see more and more output from our favorite fantasy prognosticators, this is just a reminder that FantasyRundown.com does an awesome job of gathering all the rankings out there and notes the date of posting so that you know just how recent those rankings are; that's crucial for this time of year.

On a mock draft note, I like how Dynasty Football Warehouse is creating a library (of course I dig it) of mock drafts they participated in so far this year with other experts in the industry. Keep building that list up, I say - should be an excellent resource. By the way, DFW is a new-to-me site and I would encourage any of you out there who have found an awesome site that I don't link to (or created an awesome site) to e-mail me the link to let me know. Eventually I'll read my e-mail and love sharing new sites with you FFLibrarian readers.

There are plenty of mock 2012 NFL Drafts out there (that's real draft, not fantasy draft) - are those of interest to you all? If so, let me know in the comments and I'll get some links up to those.

And an aside for those of you into fantasy baseball - FantasyPros.com is doing awesome stuff for baseball season. Two things I wanted to highlight are the My Playbook function which lets you import your teams (for free) and they tailor advice and news to fit your players. And of course their Articles page is right up my alley and everything is conveniently tagged and sorted by topics and sources. Good stuff.

About Me

So why Fantasy Football Librarian? I have been playing fantasy football now for 12 years. I'm also a librarian at a museum in New York City (though my family and I now live in Knoxville, Tennessee) and I love to research stuff. What could be better than combining my love for football and research? So in September 2006, I launched FFLibrarian to try and create one place for fantasy football fans to find the info they need to succeed in their leagues.
From 2007-2013, I conducted an accuracy analysis of the experts' rankings with support from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, and have written columns for The New York Times' Fifth Down blog and the Bruno Boys.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions. Here's to the 2016 season!